In the world of web design, there are plenty of mistakes you can
make, and in this article, I'm going to look at what I believe
to be the top 10 biggest. You need to check your site for these
mistakes right now, and fix them if they're there - otherwise
you're going to be annoying your visitors and driving them away
from your site.
1. Too Many Ads. When you're trying to make money from your
website, it's all too easy to try to fit in more ads than you
really should, or start using ad formats that are too intrusive.
If you've put a new ad on your site, go to the site as if you
were a visitor, and ask yourself honestly: is this just too much?
2. Plugin Overload. You've got to keep media that uses plugins
to a strict maximum of one per page: that means that if you've
got Flash, then you can't have a media player, or if you're
using Java then you can't have Flash. It's not as bad to use the
same plugin twice, however.
3. Flash Intros. Please, don't use a Flash intro on your
website. You'd think everyone would realise they're a bad idea
by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don't
seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and
hated. Don't be one of those people.
4. Unclear Layout and Navigation. Many websites, especially
business sites, seem to suffer from some kind of disease where
even the very simplest task takes ten steps to achieve. If
people are emailing you to ask you how to do things on your
site, then you need to improve your layout and navigation.
Remember: if there are certain tasks people seem to want to do
more often, put them on the front page.
5. No Marking for External Links. There are two kinds of links:
internal (to other parts of your website) and external (to other
websites). For the benefit of your visitors, though, it's best
if you mark external links, either by making them a different
colour or using some kind of a symbol (a box with an arrow is
the usual one). It's also good to make the external links open
in new windows, so people aren't leaving your site altogether
when they click them.
6. Unclear Linking. You might think it looks better to only show
links when people put their mouse over them, or not make their
colour stand out too much from the rest of the text, but it's
not - while it might make the design look nicer, it makes it far
less usable. Use a clearly contrasting colour for links, and
preferably underline them.
7. Unlabelled Email Links. It's a very bad idea to ever use a
link that will send email (a mailto link) without clearly
marking it with the word 'email'. If you just make clicking
people's names send email, you'll annoy visitors who just
clicked wanting to find out more about the person.
8. Broken Links. You've got to check all your links regularly to
make sure that they all still work. There's nothing worse than
finding a site that looks useful, only to find that it hasn't
been updated in years and none of the links work any more. Yes,
a website does mostly run itself after a while, but that doesn't
mean that you should neglect the essential maintenance it needs
from time to time.
9. Strange Fonts. Stick to the most common web fonts: that's
pretty much just Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. If you're
using more obscure fonts, then most visitors probably won't have
them - and the ones that do will find your text hard to read.
The only time you should use non-standard fonts is in your logo
or in headings, if they are displayed as an image.
10. Badly-sized Text. It's important to keep your text around
the standard size (preferably just below). Making text too big
or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many
visitors. The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing
(not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user's
preferred text size. You might also consider offering buttons on
your site to decrease or increase the size.
About the author:
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
